Palace and Hovel; Or, Phases of London LifeKirwan, Daniel Joseph
History
Palace and Hovel; Or, Phases of London Life
Kirwan, Daniel Joseph
London (England) -- Description and travel; London (England) -- Social life and customs
There are large and beautiful pleasure grounds all around the Crystal
Palace, and all the great national fetes, concerts, and open air
demonstrations, take place here. Patti, Nillson, and Sims Reeves, sing
here in benefits for charitable associations, and for a shilling, a
person may listen to ballads on Saturday afternoons, at these concerts,
sung by the greatest living English tenor. Then there are acres of
restaurants and dining saloons inside and outside of the Crystal
Palace, and apparatus and cooking utensils are on the premises, whereby
ten thousand people may find dinner, all at one time, and sit down to
tables in five minutes after dinner has been ordered. During the long
summer evenings, promenade concerts are held at the Crystal Palace, and
fireworks are let off in the presence of great crowds, who enjoy the
sports and junketings much as a New York crowd may do on a Fourth of
July night, in the City Hall, or Madison Park.
The contents of the Palace itself are calculated to puzzle the brains
of a philosopher. Everything wonderful, curious, precious, or difficult
to find at any other place, may be found at the Crystal Palace.
Specimens of architecture, sculpture of all ages, tombs, temples,
busts, statues, capitals, hieroglyphs, from Greece, Rome, Egypt, and
Italy, portions and entire courts from the glorious Alhambra, gigantic
relics and ruins from the Palaces of Babylon, Susa, and Nineveh;
fragments of the Christian temples of Italy, the castles and churches
of Germany, the Chateaux of Belgium and France, and the Cathedrals and
Mansions of England, from the earliest ages to the present time, all of
which are arranged in "courts" in the most systematic order.
Beside these there are many Industrial "Courts" containing the most
wonderful and useful inventions of the genius and scholar. Then there
are gigantic models of the tremendous animals who existed before the
flood, with models of huge and hideous reptiles, and saurians, who did
their level best in the same period.
[Sidenote: COST OF GROUNDS AND BUILDING.]
Some sunny Saturdays as many as fifty thousand people pay visits to
the Crystal Palace, and to see and enjoy all these wonders, the
charge is only one shilling, including concerts, music, fireworks, and
flirtations.
The last time I was there it was on the occasion of the Royal Dramatic
Fete, for the benefit of the profession, and fully a hundred thousand
persons were present, including the Prince and Princess of Wales, and
many of the nobility.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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